“Good Evening. Hello. I Have Cancer.”

What is the point of seeing live comedy? The simplest answer—to laugh—is inadequate. Like orgasm, laughter is freely available to anyone with a laptop, but it is not fulfilling per se. Spend twenty seconds on YouTube. Watch a dog falling off a treadmill or a newscaster farting on live television. You will laugh, but you will feel nothing. So we put on deodorant, leave the house, buy an overpriced beer, and find pleasure in the company of other humans. We do this because we crave intimacy.

Tig Notaro has been called a comic’s comic. She is rangy and slight and wears lots of hoodies; though over forty, from some angles she could pass for sixteen. Before August 3rd of this year, her stage persona was somewhere on the Steven Wright-Todd Barry-Mitch Hedberg continuum—verbally sharp, intense but spacey, relishing awkward pauses. Some of her jokes were deadpan one-liners (“I’ve been battling SIDS all my life”). Some were conceptually adroit, but drew more knowing nods than laughs. Some, like “No Moleste,” functioned both as observational humor and a critique of observational humor: the joke contains a genuine insight, but the premise that leads up to it (“So he thought that I thought…”) is almost parodically baroque. Last year, in a bit of inspired absurdism, she pushed a stool around the set of “Conan” for a hundred and one long seconds.

Then, two months ago, she abruptly started doing something else. At the time, she was hosting a regular show at Largo, the illustriously hip club in Los Angeles. For her August 3rd set, she planned to deliver her usual jokes—a recent favorite was about a bee flying alongside her car on the highway—but, she later told me, “It felt so silly and irrelevant to think about that stuff, observational jokes about bees and stuff, in light of what was going on with me.” Her personal life had been falling apart. That’s what she wanted to talk about, though she didn’t know how, exactly. “I pictured myself opening the show by pulling up a stool and going, ‘Bear with me. I’ve been going through a rough time, and this is going to be a departure from what I usually do….’ But that felt really lame.”

Instead, she walked to the mic and, while the audience was still applauding, she said, “Good evening. Hello. I have cancer. How are you? Hi, how are you? Is everybody having a good time? I have cancer.” After a few seconds, she exhaled heavily and murmured, “Ah, god.” Then, in a loud, pinched voice: “Oh my god!” She seemed to be experiencing several conflicting emotions at once. The audience response, which had been warm, fractured into hoots and nervous titters. People were beginning to realize that this was not a bizarre setup; Notaro was telling the truth and groping blindly for a way to make it funny. She said, “It’s weird because with humor, the equation is Tragedy + Time = Comedy. I am just at tragedy right now.”

Speaking in a frank, flat rhythm, she filled in the backstory. In March, she was hospitalized with a bacterial infection that almost destroyed her intestines. A week after she left the hospital, her mother died in a freak accident. Then she broke up with her girlfriend. Then she was diagnosed with Stage 2 cancer in both breasts. All this had happened within four months. “But, you know, what’s nice about all of this is that you can always rest assured that God never gives you more than you can handle,” she said in her Largo set, wryly recycling a cliché she had heard many times as a child in rural Mississippi. “I just keep picturing God going, ‘You know what? I think she can take a little more.’” The set lasted thirty minutes, and long stretches of it elicited more stunned silence than laughter. “I didn’t know what it was, honestly, even when I was on stage doing it,” she said. But whatever was happening, it was connecting.

In May, after the breakup but before the cancer, Notaro appeared on the radio show “This American Life,” where she told a dry but endearing story about meeting the eighties pop star Taylor Dayne. “She stole the show,” Ira Glass told me. “No contest. That story is like a perfect pop song.”

After that, Glass said, “I was all ‘what else you got?,’ and she said she wanted to write about the stuff she’d been going through this year. She did a draft. A couple of the anecdotes had promise, but mostly it didn’t work. It was a list of events, cleanly rendered on the page, but not so compelling to read one after another. I suggested she try to approach the material, but more in the style her act is written in. We had a long meeting that ended with both of us wondering if she’d ever try it. By that I mean: she didn’t seem so receptive.”

“I left that meeting so frustrated,” Notaro said. “Ira told me, ‘Whenever this becomes funny to you, try it onstage.’ I just didn’t see how that would ever happen.”

Then she got the cancer diagnosis. Somehow, this changed her mind. “It wasn’t that it was funny,” she said, “but it was just—how can one person get this much bad news? It just fascinated me, and it became the only thing I could think about.” She decided to take Glass’s advice.

On the recording, you can hear audience members taking the news badly—one of them sounds like a wounded puppy—and each time, Notaro reacts to their reactions. “Are you going to be O.K.?” she asks one woman. At one point, Notaro apologizes: “I really don’t mean to bum you guys out…. What if I just transitioned right now into just silly jokes?”

“No,” an audience member insists. “This is fucking amazing.”

Louis C.K., arguably the greatest living standup, watched Notaro from backstage. He understood, perhaps better than she did, what was happening to her. He, too, had once been a verbally deft absurdist who had found his true comedic voice by probing the corners of his id. “When you’re done telling jokes about airplanes and dogs,” CK once explained, “and you throw those away, what do you got left? You can only dig deeper, start talking about your feelings and who you are.” CK saw the Largo set as Notaro’s epiphanic moment, when she got fed up with reflexive jokes and started digging. The next day, CK tweeted, “In 27 years doing this, I’ve seen a handful of truly great, masterful standup sets. One was Tig Notaro last night at Largo.” The next day, over lunch with Woody Allen, CK continued gushing. That afternoon, he called Notaro and convinced her that her first-draft attempt at cancer comedy, a private “workout set” she never thought even her friends would hear, should be released as an album.

The first time I listened to it, I laughed out loud exactly once, when Notaro described finding a questionnaire from the hospital in her dead mother’s mail. “Number four: ‘Suggestions for improvements.’ Such as: should we stop sending questionnaires to dead people?” She seems desperate to forge her tragedy into comedy; if time hasn’t done it yet, perhaps brute repetition will. “Hospital … it’s really simple. Make two lists … Number one would just be dead people. Number two would be alive people. Send questionnaires to alive people. Don’t send questionnaires to dead people.”

A half-hour comedy set with just one laugh-out-loud bit sounds like a bore. But “Live,” the recording of Notaro’s Largo set that is available for purchase starting today, is always engaging, even if it’s not quite the transcendent achievement we had been told to expect. Most comics—including, before this August, Tig Notaro—spend so many months honing their material that it becomes a sort of condensed abstract poetry. But Notaro’s Largo set was closer to a diary entry—more erratic, but also more intimate. Rather than dazzling the audience with her wit, she processed her emotions in real time, and let them watch. The stage was no longer a barrier but a buffer: only from that distance, spurred by hot lights and adrenaline, could she have found the courage to be so candid.

When she ran out of misery, Notaro asked the audience how she should end the set. “Tell the bee joke,” someone suggested. So she put on her erstwhile comedian persona, and she told the bee joke. “Do you have any idea how frustrating it is when a bee passes you in five o’clock traffic?” she asked with an exasperated sigh. The joke killed. “I was writing last night,” Notaro told me earlier this week, “and I read what I’d written, and I thought, This is nothing like what I’ve done in the past. I don’t know if it’s just for now or if it’s long-term, but this has changed me. I don’t even know if it’s funny! I don’t know what’s going on.

“Of course, comedy should be funny. But if what I am doing right now is not even recognized as comedy, that’s O.K. with me too. I think I’ll find the humor in it; I think that’s innately in me. But I don’t think there are a lot of bee jokes coming up, I’ll put it that way.”